Projects
This page is a compilation of projects shown in class or discussed in the book. Allan Kaprow Kaprow is best known for his "Happenings". Happenings are loosely scripted events that use non-permanent materials described as "A game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing." Fluids thumb|left|300px|Time lapse of a fluid happening. Rectangular enclosures about 30 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 8 feet high are built out of ice blocks and left to melt.http://www.moca.org/kaprow/index.php/category/fluids/ Yard thumb|300px|left|This is William Pope's version of Yard A room full of tires with a shelf full of black plastic bags. People are encouraged by a recording to "rearrange the tires, rearrange your life".http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/arts/design/13johnson.html Yoko Ono Yoko Ono is a female japanese artist who is part of the fluxus movement. Cut Piece thumb|300px|left|Yoko Ono 2003 Cut Piece The performer sits on stage with a pair of scissors in front of them. The audience is told that they can come up and cut off pieces of clothing from the performer, as much as they wish. Cindy Sherman First and foremost, Cindy Sherman fucking rules. She stands out as an artist due to her frank and straightforward style that focuses on the identity and imaging of women. Her most well-known project is the Untitled Film Still Series. http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1997/sherman/index.html Untitled Film Stills In respect to the Untitled Film Stills Series, moma.org states, "Sherman began making these pictures in 1977, when she was twenty-three. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blonde actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills—or perhaps like publicity pix—purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen (#3) and lounging in the bedroom (#6). On to something, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway (#7), the luscious librarian (#13, at left), the domesticated sex kitten (#14), the hot-blooded woman of the people (#35), the ice-cold sophisticate (#50), and others. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés." Kacie Kinzer Known for her development of Tweenbots, which are essentially human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal. The project aims to answer the question: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”